In Washington, a Rural County Sheriff Fights His State’s Immigration Law

In his pocket of eastern Washington, where sweet corn and potato fields stretch for miles, Sheriff Dale Wagner of Adams County talks about immigration enforcement in solemn terms like oath and duty.

But precisely whom Sheriff Wagner has a duty to serve and obey is a question that has put him at odds with the state’s top law enforcement official and thrust the two of them into an escalating debate over what role local and state authorities should play in helping enforce immigration law.

Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, has accused Sheriff Wagner in a lawsuit of sharing inmate information with federal immigration agents in defiance of a state law meant to limit collaboration between Washington’s law enforcement officers and federal immigration agencies.

In an interview in his office in the city of Othello, Sheriff Wagner defended providing inmate information to federal agents, saying he was within his authority and that he was doing what he needed to do to protect his constituents.

“It goes back to my oath,” he said. “I protect the State of Washington’s Constitution as best I can, and the United States Constitution as best I can, and that’s all I can do.”

The lawsuit also alleges that deputies in his office have been holding people in jail based solely on immigration status, and that deputies have been allowing such prisoners to be interrogated by federal agents — allegations that Sheriff Wagner said were untrue.

With 21,000 residents, Adams County might have seemed an unlikely setting for a showdown on immigration policy, but the fight between the sheriff and the attorney general has drawn considerable attention on the other side of the country, in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday morning, Sheriff Wagner is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to talk about his fight over immigration enforcement — a fight that has drawn him legal representation from a conservative organization founded by President Trump’s chief immigration adviser, Stephen Miller.

For years, federal agents have been frustrated by the limits many cities and states have placed on their law enforcement agencies when it comes to cooperating on immigration enforcement, which is generally a civil matter, not a criminal one. Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, he and his top aides have lashed out at so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, which limit voluntary cooperation with immigration authorities.

In recent weeks, the Department of Homeland Security has been reviewing billions of dollars in grants for cities and states to assess whether jurisdictions receiving the federal funds are in line with Mr. Trump’s priorities on immigration.

But while many local law enforcement leaders have backed sanctuary practices, some officials, and especially sheriffs in rural and Republican-leaning areas of the country, have sought to serve as allies in the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out mass deportations.

Indeed, the White House has come to see local sheriffs as crucial to the president’s immigration agenda: They can identify immigrants in their custody who may be deportable and relay that information to immigration authorities.

In Washington State, a law passed in 2019 put strict limits on what information could be shared with the federal government, and the attorney general, Mr. Brown, said his lawsuit against Sheriff Wagner was about ensuring that officials comply with the state law.

“Right now, we have federal immigration officials who are, in my view, essentially kidnapping people off the streets without due process,” Mr. Brown said in a video interview from his office in Seattle. “And I don’t want, nor does most Washington law enforcement want, to be involved in the sort of draconian actions that we’re seeing all across the country.”

Sheriff Wagner has cast the battle between his department, which has 18 officers, and the state attorney general’s office as a fight between “David and Goliath,” a characterization that Mr. Brown scoffed at. “He’s backed by the White House, right?” Mr. Brown said. “So maybe, maybe he’s Goliath, and we’re David?”

Adams County Versus Washington

Mr. Wagner, a California native, joined the Adams County Sheriff’s Office in 1997 when he first moved to Othello, and became a detective about eight years later. The sparsely populated region, about 100 miles from Spokane, encompasses creeks and rich fields of cherries, apples and potatoes.

The state’s agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing and hunting industries all rely heavily on workers born outside the country, some of them lawful residents, others undocumented, according to researchers. Over the years, many of those workers have come from Latin America, and today the county is 64 percent Hispanic.

When he was elected sheriff in 2014, Mr. Wagner says he began working to bring on more Latino deputies. One of those early recruits, Adolfo Coronado, has climbed the ranks to become the agency’s second-in-command. Some of the Latino deputies he enlisted have family members who have been entangled in the immigration system. Others are immigrants themselves.

Sheriff Wagner said he was proud of his work to increase the racial and ethnic makeup of his department, efforts that are under attack by the Trump administration, but was quick to note: “That doesn’t mean D.E.I. to me — it’s qualified people.”

Othello is the largest city in Adams County, which voted for Mr. Trump for president by a 43-percent margin in the 2024 election. Mr. Wagner said that the county, with a conservative and religious population, has views that are very different from those of the Democratic leadership in Olympia, the state capital.

Immigration enforcement is an important issue for his constituents, he said, adding that immigrants were being held not because they were undocumented but because they had broken criminal laws.

Adams County no longer has its own jail, having closed the facility in the county seat, Ritzville, in 2022 and contracted with a neighboring county for jail space. When booking prisoners into the jail, Adams County posts their names online, searchable by anyone, including immigration authorities.

As a condition of federal grant funds to cover for overtime, the sheriff’s office is required to send information on anyone cited for a traffic violation to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And Sheriff Wagner said that ICE agents periodically contact his deputies to seek information about certain people the agency is pursuing.

“They’re a law enforcement agency,” he said. “We do share information from time to time with them based off of what we’re trying to accomplish with what we are doing.”

A bipartisan law

The “Keep Washington Working Act” was drafted with input drawn from law enforcement agencies, large and small, along with business and immigrant rights groups across the state. When the law was passed in 2019, it drew the support of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

Jennyfer Mesa, executive director and founder, Latinos En Spokane, a Latino rights advocacy organization, said that Latino workers in Spokane and its surrounding area had previously endured years of immigration raids aboard Greyhound buses and inside bus stations. Ryan Frazier, a teacher at the Othello school district, said the law eased fears of deportation among his students.

But Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which has filed its own lawsuit against Sheriff Wagner’s office over its cooperation with immigration agencies, said he worried that the progress brought about by the law could be undone. “There is a pattern here, and you have to be held accountable,” Mr. Adams said.